WOW – Workout Of the Week – 8/20/18 – The Mood Booster!

The WOW – Work of the Week for this week 8/20/18 is what we at GoodAttitudeFood.com call “The Mood Booster” workout! The workout is going to be riding our stationary bike along with this really cool 20 minute spin video from “Shane’s Spin Class“. Shane’s Spin Class has some other great spin bike videos on their channel, please check them out!

The video this week is the 20 minute spin with visual cues, decent music, and it was shot with a very cool first person point of view camera. The video is great. It feels like you are right there spinning on the trail yourself with the camera view. The rider goes through a half-flooded, rain soaked, tropical terrain. Part of the time I was flinching, expecting myself to get soaked, almost completely washed out in a couple spots!

The cues on the video take riders through a pyramid style, one-minute-on, one-minute-off work cadence. The video goes through a warm-up, and then minute rounds with building intensity. When the intensity is at six, that is the top of the pyramid. The rest of the rounds after that decrease intensity. I didn’t count, but it’s 20 minutes, so it’s enough to get a good sweat and not burn out.

Shadow boxing is a great thing to do. It’s almost mediative. Give it a try sometime!

**At GoodAttitudeFood.com we do not condone fighting for no reason, but we do think everyone should be able to defend themself if they need to. One of the best ways to know how to defend yourself, is to practice it! It is far better to be ready, and never have to use it, than to have to use it, and have never practiced it – said someone much smarter than me! 🙂

Then I follow that up with two rounds of this post workout stretching routine.

That brings me to an important part of this weeks workout. I call it the Mood Booster. It really is a mood boosting routine. There is a reason I bought a stationary bike. I did research on what exercise machines make people feel good. Almost all of my research lead to spin bikes and stationary bikes being reported as making people FEEL the happiest.

Remeber folks, I was not always a happy person. I was a very negative person, for a very long time. I bought a stationary spin bike and started doing HIIT training because I knew it was a way to loose weight, but also because my research found that it was a mood boosting training method. Here is an article from Pschology Today which talks about the benefits of cycling.

**The benefits listed include, but are not limited to, increases in BDNF – brain derived neurotropic factor – which you can read about it here. A lot of smart people call call BDNF “Miracle-grow for the brain”. I don’t have a way to prove it, but I don’t think I could have passed my College Algebra, Forecasting, Advanced Statistics, or other math classes without the brain benefits from riding my stationary bike. There might be something to this BDNF and cycling link.

Riding an exercise bike and doing it to an alternating cadence, with HIIT type efforts, will improve a person’s mood. I combine it with meditative-like shadow boxing to get an even better brain boost. I am telling you, shadow boxing is fun, but it also works the brain. It makes you be creative and use your imagination. This stimulates the brain and will have a mood boosting effect as well.

That is why I call this workout The Mood Booster. Thanks for reading! Please hit that like button! Follow for more. Be happy and healthy my friends! Remember, you can be the hero of your own story!